Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

Color must be thought, imagined, dreamed.

Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. To such an extent indeed that one day, finding myself at the deathbed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself in the act of focusing on her temples and automatically analyzing the succession of appropriately graded colors which death was imposing on her motionless face.

We never really perceive what color is physically!

The great use of copying, if it be at all useful, should seem to be in learning color; yet even coloring will never be perfectly attained by servilely copying the model before you.

Color which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power.

There's plenty of film out there, and quadrillions of cameras that use film - I don't think it makes much sense not to use it. The thing that's going out is the manufacturing of the paper. Incidentally, all these years my wife has told me that I'm color-blind.

As my friend Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe has argued persuasively, there is an element of positivity in the visible world, and in color particularly, that totally eludes the historicity of language, with its protocols of absence and polarity. The color red, as an attribute of the world, is always there. It is something other than the absence of yellow and blue--and, thus, when that red becomes less red, it becomes more one or the other. It never exists in a linguistic condition of degradation or excess that must necessarily derive from our expectations.

There are chemists who spend their whole lives trying to find out what's in a lump of sugar. I want to know one thing. What is color?

My goal is to formulate a new color theory based on the full spectrum of visible light.

Colour as perceived by us is a function of three independent variables at least three are I think sufficient, but time will show if I thrive.

Color is like cooking. The cook puts in more or less salt, that's the difference!

Suffice it to say that black and white are also colors... for their simultaneous contrast is as striking as that of green and red, for instance.

At least 15 percent of human females possess a genetic mutation that gives them an extra (fourth) type of color photoreceptor - and this allows them to discriminate between colors that look identical to the majority of us with a mere three types of color photoreceptors.

There is no criterion by which to recognize what is a color, except that it is one of our colors.

It seemed to me that it was possible to translate light, forms, and character using nothing but color, without recourse to values.

The laws of the colors are unutterably beautiful, just because they are not accidental.

Repeated similar experiments with adjacent colors will show that any ground subtracts its own hue from colors which it carries and therefore influences.

I work with few colors, what creates the illusion of quantity is that they fell in the right place.

Blue is the only color which maintains its own character in all its tones it will always stay blue; whereas yellow is blackened in its shades, and fades away when lightened; red when darkened becomes brown, and diluted with white is no longer red, but another color – pink.

I don't think he (Joseph Albers, fh) ever realized that it was his discipline that I came for. Besides, my response to what I learned from him was just the opposite of what he intended.. ..I was very hesitant about arbitrarily designing forms and selecting colors that would achieve some predetermined result, because I didn't have any ideas to support that sort of thing - I didn't want color to serve me, in other words.

Color exists in itself, possessing its own beauty.

The art of the colorist has in some ways elements of mathematics and music.

It was as if I had worked for years on the wrong side of a tapestry, learning accurately all its lines and figures, yet always missing its color and sheen.

The relation of color and the relation of proportion are both based on the relation of position.

Color is sensitivity in material form, substance in its purest form.